If you watched the Apple keynote yesterday, you got to see a promo video for the new MacBook Air featuring Apple design chief, Jony Ive, waxing-poetic about the inner-beauty of the new, lightweight laptop. If you think Mr. Ives could be a little biased — or have some sort of odd trust issue towards middle-aged men with charming accents — you can get a look at the Air‘s innards for yourself. As is customary, the crew over at iFixit have given the new electronic gizmo the teardown treatment. Hit the read link to have a look for yourself. More →

Today, Microsoft announced that chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, would be stepping down from his CSA role as he transitions towards retirement. In a company-wide memo, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote:

He [Ray] will remain with the company as he transitions the teams and ongoing strategic projects within his organization – bringing the great innovations and great innovators he’s assembled into the groups driving our business. Following the natural transition time with his teams but before he retires from Microsoft, Ray will be focusing his efforts in the broader area of entertainment where Microsoft has many ongoing investments. We have tremendous opportunities in the entertainment space overall, and I’m excited about what we can accomplish. Beyond that, Ray has no plans at this time. While he’ll continue to report to me during the transition, the CSA role was unique and I won’t refill the role after Ray’s departure. We have a strong planning process, strong technical leaders in each business group and strong innovation heading to the market.

The rest of the memo gives thanks to Mr. Ozzie for his service and leadership at Microsoft; especially his work in cloud computing. Hit the read link to see the full memo. More →

Analytics company iSuppli has completed their analysis of Apple’s sixth-generation iPod nano. The company concludes that the small, square, touch-screen media player costs the Cupertino company $45.10 to manufacture; $43.73 in materials and $1.37 in manufacturing costs. The most expensive components on the device are the 8GB of NAND Flash memory ($14.40), the display ($11.50), and the Samsung processor ($4.95). Apple sells 8GB model of the device for $149. Not a bad profit margin, eh? More →

Those of you trying to get some Internet stalking done may have noticed that “the Facebooks” are currently down. This is the social networking site’s second major outage in as many days. All we know for the time being is a DNS error message is received when trying to resolve facebook.com. We urge everyone to stay calm, as we’re sure this will be resolved soon. However… what are you going to do in the meantime?

UPDATE: The Book appears to be back up. We’ll post a link to Facebook’s technical explanation if provided.

In accordance with government wishes, Saudi Arabia’s three mobile wireless companies have shut down BlackBerry messaging services to their users. The Saudi Communications and Information Technology Commission cited security concerns when it announced on August 3rd that: “the manufacturer of the devices [RIM] couldn’t meet the regulatory requirements of the commission and it is not in accordance with the regulations and conditions of licenses issued to service providers, at its present state.” The AFP reports that any wireless company that does not turn off the encrypted messaging service could face up to a $1.3 million fine. The BlackBerry devices are still able to make and receive phone calls. Services are due to be suspended in the United Arab Emirates beginning on October 11th. More →

Happy Tuesday morning everyone. If you’ve wandered over to the online Apple Store today, you may have notice that… well, it’s down. Tuesday typically is the day that Apple will update or refresh products and rumors have been circulating the interwebs about a new 27-inch cinema display, an updated iMac, and a refresh to the aging Mac Pro line. The good news about these rumors? We won’t have to wait very long to figure out if they’re true or not!

Huh? Umm, it’s not a Tuesday but the Apple store is down and has been for at least 20 minutes now. Is this just some routine maintenance? Did someone turn the heat up on Apple’s servers? Are we going to see a very uncharacteristic weekend product refresh? The latter is a bit unlikely but hey, stranger things have happened. We’ll keep our collective eye on the site just in case something sneaky is going down…

Yesterday we reported a major data outage plaguing BlackBerry users across the country and while certain regions seem to be back in action today, many BlackBerry users are still left wondering when their service might be restored. Issues in the southern region reportedly resulted from the severing of a fiber line but that can hardly account for the massive outages experienced all day long, spanning from coast to coast. We’re still waiting for word on possible causes but while service has been restored for many BlackBerry users at this point, many more are still left without data. We spoke to our pals at AT&T, one of the carriers whose customers are still affected, and information was scarce at best. All they could tell us was that BES is still down for many, it’s a RIM issue and RIM’s engineers are “working on it”. We know several areas of the Northeast are still without service, including many in the New York / New Jersey region, but AT&T claims only enterprise customers are still affected at this point.

Unfortunately for those still without data, all you can do is wait patiently for service to be restored and try to maintain your indoor voice when calling and asking for a credit on your bill. Remember, this is a RIM issue so there really isn’t anything carriers can do. We’re well past the 24-hour mark, making this one of the more serious outages in recent history and at this point all we can say is… Step it up RIM! Drop us a line in the comments and let us know if you’re back in business or still twiddling your thumbs.